In the course of research for the 19-CD box set of Sandy Denny's work due out in October, a previously unknown early recording has come to light. It had its first airing on the Radcliffe and Maconie show on BBC Radio 2 on Wednesday night. No one can identify it. It doesn't sound like an original composition of hers. Could it be trad? The lyrics are approximately as follows:

I saw a dark star against the black sky Of a night thirteen hundred years long It cast shrouding shadows upon the desert Of the dark moons that formed in her eyes

On the ? of ? the sun never smiled And the noon of the day was in shadow And the sky left its tears on the black barren earth And the ? was ? in ?

On a shrine of black flowers Methusa lay dead As he had for thirteen centuries At his feet five crows stood and watched to his keep And the whisper of time sighed around the hills

Pannasowna has tried fair winged [weird] for it stead Though the sky's in search of a [the] star And the serpent entwined about the stag's head Tried to reach out and poison her hair.

O no, Pannasowna, you will not go far Methusa has only one hour And if you do not reach him before it is over Then the ? falls into the ocean [sea].

Pannasowna took her form and she stabbed [pierced] the serpent's eye And he fell through the clouds to the land. [sea] As she rode on and on through the blazing sky With horizons of light in her unsung [till she came to ?]

It was then that the daylight became the dark night [And] she recalled [remembered] what the ? [sermon] had said: When the night becomes black and no sound can be heard, You have come to the land of ? [Fardinarel]

And she found the dark star hanging low in the sky And she gathered it up in her arms And she rode to the shrine where Methusa lay dead [and she rode to the place that was so ?] And she placed the dark star on her ?

And the star became bright and it shone on the land And the shrouds of darkness were gone And Methusa was standing beside [before] Pannazorna And the light came to bear in her hair.

Could be a translation from something like Gaelic. We have nothing remotely like this in the English-speaking tradition. Another possibility is a poem from a fiction work set to music. Has it got a trad tune or is the tune flowery as well?

It's a very simple tune: vaguely modal, but with alternating major and minor chords in the harmony. The accompaniment is finger-picking guitar -- unusually fast for Sandy. If you're in the UK you can hear it on the BBC site at Radcliffe and Maconie show (it's about 32 minutes into the show).

I hear someone like Lord Dunsany in the words. I remember The King of Elfland's Daughter was big in the 60s and 70s.

Gaelic poems can indeed be quite colourful and (melo)dramatic, but I've never heard of Methusa (which sounds like someone's heard the name Methusela) or Fardinarel (ditto Tolkien) or Pannazorna (ditto something Polynesian).

At nearly 200 quid this is for the serious Sandy Denny fans obviously. That is, for those who already have every studio album multiple times: LP, CD reissue, deluxe CD issue, plus several box sets with *all* previously unreleased stuff as the Music Rehashing Industry already promised us several times. How many really new tracks will be found in the bottom of the barrel and in which quality? A dozen? Twenty? That would be 10 quid per track. Fans must really be desperate?

I must confess that I'm somewhat bemused - as a relative newbie to the folk scene myself - at the suggestion this is a "traditional" song from music people who are a) presumably quite well educated types, and b) who know Sandy Denny's work - considering she was of course a folk singer who did indeed perform traditional songs of which this clearly isn't one.

So, can I have a research job please music people. I like music and I can Google too..

Why so cynical? First off, if you pay 200 quid for the box you've been robbed. Amazon is listing at under £150 and others may come in cheaper. As I understand it, the aim is to have the whole box set on iTunes, so if fans don't want the eighty or more tracks previously unreleased or the lavish accompanying book full of previously unseen photos, they can probably download what they do want. Take a look at the Island site for track listings.

In any case, this thread wasn't about the box. It was a polite request for help with identifying a mystery track. We've established what it's not - traditional. So any ideas what it is, please?

Again PW, sorry.. :/ Mudcat can be a gout inspired den of mischief sometimes! I still think the song isn't a bad piece of psych-folk though. It might not be 'Jane Delawney's Garden', but watch out for the young brood of Wickerish-Folkies snapping it up in the months to come!

I refuse to believe that anybody could be so gormless as to imagine words like that could be a trad song.Or certainly not somebody who lashed out a lot of money on Sandy Denny records, anyway. So, what could the motives of the original poster have been?

OK so the guy asked the wrong question. He should have asked: can anyone identify this song? Since evidently no one can, I suggest you let it drop instead of slagging him off for having the temerity to ask a question, however wrong-headed.

Actually Reinhard, I am compiling this boxset, and I can assure you there are many unreleased recordings of exceptionally high quality- far better than most of the unreleased tracks on Boxful- you really should hear some of them before issuing such a negative judgement! perhaps it would be helpful for you to look at it in another way- if there wasn't a large selection of high quality unreleased recordings this boxset wouldn't be happening. Also there is a 72 page hard back book full of amazing pictures of Sandy not seen before. Yes this is aimed at a collector, but this will I assure you be a most impressive release, and you are getting alot for your money.

@ greg stephens - "I refuse to believe that anybody could be so gormless as to imagine words like that could be a trad song."

It was Radcliffe and Maconie on their show who said that it "it looks like it's a traditional song, or it sounds like it's a traditional song", so maybe the OP was merely repeating their question. No need to impute impure motives to him.

They also said it was found "two weeks ago" (two weeks before 21 July, presumably) in a tape box under her bed (32:55 at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00t38c9 )

@ greg stephens "I thought the poster was speaking for him/herself, and it surprised me"

He mentioned the "trad" possibility only after hearing Radcliffe or Maconie comment. On his own Sandy Denny blog the day before the radio broadcast he says of it: "It may be an original, but if so, with its cod mythology and sword-and-sorcery medievalism, it's not quite like anything else Sandy ever did" and he's just looking for any info he can find on it. http://sandydenny.blogspot.com/2010/07/mystery-song.html

Well, Mark Radcliffe is a master of wind up... he's well-informed enough to have worked out it wasn't trad, but quite prepared to wind up the stuffed shirts who get prickly at the suggestion it might be!

Don't forget that he's a folk performer in his own right, and as part of the 'Family Mahone'.

It wasn't Radcliffe. He's on holiday or something. Maconie presented the show solo (and presumably made up all that blather about a tape being found two weeks ago "under her bed"). If he knew anything about Denny he'd know that her effects ended up in Australia after her death when her husband moved back there.

Just listened... the accompaniment is someone playing a 12-string guitar, but I would doubt it to be Sandy. It sounds as if it was recorded on a reasonably good tape machine, and the tape itself seems to have survived exceptionally well.

Yes, I too felt the accompaniment was distinctly different in style to what I'd normally associate with Sandy herself (and certainly uncharacteristically fast). I also noticed that her voice did not cut through the guitar part very well in the first few stanzas and it was very hard to make out the words until around halfway into the song. And yes, the tape itself does seem to have survived remarkably well. It is all a bit of a puzzle, for sure.

Is it just me, or is that really a dire song? It sounds like very early Sandy, vocally - my guess would be it was one of her early efforts, or possibly something written by the frantic 12-stringer, assuming that to be someone else. Sandy was a great singer in Fairport and a captivating solo performer and songwriter - releasing this does her memory no favours.